Yet I refuse to allow such negative judgments regarding gays and lesbians to go unchallenged from a religious perspective. As Catholic scholar Elizabeth Schussler-Fiorenza has maintained in her powerful book “In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins,” the divinity of any passage in Scripture that diminishes the humanity of another—as the one in Leviticus does—surely can be questioned.

The thrust of one such passage should not override an overarching biblical ethos that teaches us that God loves and affirms the full humanity of each human being.

Essentially Mr. Ellenson has missed the point of Scripture. Rather than base his views of YHWH on what the evidence of Scripture has to say and reconsider his views if he finds any inconsistency, he reserves the right to reject any evidence that suggests that he is wrong. It makes no sense for him to claim he holds by the “biblical ethos” when he takes a view contrary to the Hebrew Bible. Furthermore, Mr. Ellenson does not even understand what the passage in question is about. Leviticus 18 consists almost entirely of prohibitions, mostly of a sexual nature, culminating in descriptions of the consequences of abiding or not abiding by these prohibitions. The whole passage is about behavior. Nowhere is it claimed that homosexuals are in any way less than human or are unloved by YHWH. It should also go without saying that desire, which is often not voluntary, is not prohibited at all, so that anyone with homosexual desires—or the desire to do anything else prohibited, for that matter—is not automatically culpable or incapable of being holy. I would also like to note that Mr. Ellenson misuses the term “fundamentalist”; as noted by Dr. Stephen Prothero in Religious Literacy (pp. 180-181), fundamentalism is a form of Protestant evangelical anti-modernism, and as such the term cannot be legitimately applied to non-Protestants.